4 Best Sights in Side Trips from Toronto, Ontario

The Niagara Grape & Wine Festival group organizes three big events in Niagara. The largest, with an annual half-million attendees, is the 10-day Niagara Wine Festival in September. The three-week Niagara Ice Wine Festival in January is a nod to Niagara's specialty, ice wine. The three-weekend Niagara New Vintage Festival, in June, is a wine and culinary event.

Learn how Niagara Falls formed over thousands of years on this 20-minute simulation ride. Standing on a mesh platform surrounded by an uninterrupted 360-degree viewing screen, you feel snow falling, winds blowing, the floor rumbling, and waves crashing as you watch glaciers form, collide, and melt, creating the falls as we know them today. In certain spots you will get wet; ponchos are provided.

In operation since 1916, this antique cable car crosses the Whirlpool Basin in the Niagara Gorge. This trip is not for the fainthearted, but there's no better way to get an aerial view of the gorge, the whirlpool, the rapids, and the hydroelectric plants.

An hour-long thrill ride, these tours veer around and hurdle white-water rapids that follow Niagara canyons up to the wall of rolling waters, just below Niagara Falls. Children must be at least six years old for the open-boat Wet Jet Tour and four years old for the covered-boat (dry!) Jet Dome Tour; minimum height requirements also apply. Tours depart from Niagara-on-the-Lake or Niagara Falls, ON (June to August only) and Lewiston, NY.